1. Technical Field
Disclosed embodiments generally relate to enhancing the user experience for conferencing communications, and, in particular, to methods of using components associated with user devices as ad hoc components of a conference.
2. Description of Related Art
During a conference call, the experience for participants in one location may differ from the experience of participants in other locations. For example, a participant in a conference room may be further away from communication equipment (e.g., a telephone or microphone) than a participant sitting at his desk. As a result, the voice and video of the participant in the conference room may be less audible or visible to those participants not in the room.
Various solutions attempt to mitigate the asymmetry between participant experiences by wiring rooms with additional equipment. For example, a conference room may be wired with hanging microphones, multiple cameras, control systems, etc. Other solutions may provide extensions to conferencing equipment such as microphone extensions. These solutions are inadequate in that additional equipment may be laborious and expensive to install and maintain. Additionally, control systems in a conference room may be non-trivial to operate.
Still other solutions may allow devices to be disaggregated so that an end user may select which devices are used as endpoints for various media during a conference. For example, a user may select a computer monitor as a video endpoint and a conferencing phone as an audio endpoint. A solution such as this may be insufficient, however, because it may not allow participants in close proximity to each other to use different equipment in an effective way.